Elon Musk's main dream is doomed to failure - Mars cannot be turned into an analogue of the Earth, making the atmosphere thicker and warmer, melting its polar ice caps. Planetary scientists write about this in an article published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“New measurements from MAVEN, as well as old data from NASA probes, show that Mars simply does not have enough carbon dioxide to create a greenhouse effect that would make it warm enough for life on Earth. Terraforming Mars cannot be done with modern technology,”writes Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, MAVEN mission leader.
Son of heaven
In September 2016, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, told the world about his ambitious plans to colonize Mars, in which he plans to create a super-heavy rocket and a fleet of thousands of reusable interplanetary ships that will bring about a million people to Mars by the end of the century.
The main goal of this whole process, in defining the Mask himself, is the creation of an independent and autonomous “millionaire” city on Mars, which will provide itself with everything necessary for life and will be a full-fledged society, not inferior to communities of people on Earth.
One of the main goals of the existence of this colony, according to the entrepreneur, will be the implementation of his plans to terraform the red planet and turn it into an analogue of the Earth. For this, it is necessary, as Musk said at the beginning of this decade, to melt the polar caps of Mars with nuclear strikes, which will make its atmosphere thicker and give the colonists an initial supply of water.
As Yakoski notes, such ideas are often voiced in science fiction, but scientists have tested them extremely rarely - the last such estimates were voiced more than 20 years ago by the famous planetary scientist Christopher McKay in the journal Nature.
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Over the next two decades, according to the head of the MAVEN mission, astronomers have accumulated a lot of new data on the reserves of water, carbon dioxide and oxygen in the bowels of Mars, which McKay, Carl Sagan and other supporters of the idea of terraforming the fourth planet simply did not know about. For this reason, Yakoski and his colleague Christopher Edwards have once again tried to assess whether we can realize the dreams of Musk and many science fiction writers right now.
Martian dreams
For this, as noted by Edwards and Yakoski, it is necessary that for every square centimeter of the surface of Mars there is at least 2.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide in the "column" of air that hangs above this point. In this case, the planet will retain enough heat for it to have an almost terrestrial climate.
Using the same technique as McKay, the authors of the article calculated the mass and volume of carbon dioxide trapped in the polar caps of Mars, as well as hidden in the upper layers of the soil and in some rocks.
As these calculations showed, the complete disappearance of the polar caps of Mars will only double the atmospheric pressure and increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air up to 30 grams per square centimeter, which is 83 times less than the critical mark.
That's enough to raise temperatures on Mars by about 10 degrees Kelvin, six times below the minimum 60 degrees Kelvin.
On the other hand, the release of all CO2 reserves from frozen soil will increase its share in the atmosphere by about 6-12 times. However, even this, as stated by Edwards and Yakoski, will not be enough to trigger a full-fledged greenhouse effect.
An additional problem is that this will require warming up the soil of Mars for a very long time, about 10 thousand years, which is unlikely to be feasible in the near or even very distant future. Therefore, now we can say with certainty that terraforming Mars is still a pipe dream, scientists conclude.